Chinese Exclusion, Indigeneity, and Settler-Colonial Refusal in C Pam Zhang’sHow Much of These Hills is Gold

Abstract

Everything in US history is about the land—who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity (“real estate”) broken into pieces to be bought and sold on the market. —Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (1) The people and the land are inseparable. . . . In the old days there had been no boundaries between the people and the land. —Leslie Marmon Silko (85) C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020) begins with a simple epigraph: “This land is not your land.” More than just a contestation of the Woody Guthrie classic folk song “This Land Is Your Land” recorded in 1944, the novel comes at a time of increasing national conversation about land ownership and the United States’ settler-colonial present.1 In the context of the novel, set in an unspecified time and location, although likely sometime in the aftermath of the California Gold Rush, land claims become a central site for reading Asian American and Indigenous histories. Zhang’s genre-bending Western follows a Chinese American family from “XX42” to “XX67” and stretches from unidentified golden hills in the West to an unidentified city near the ocean (­reminiscent of San Francisco, “A fist on land that punches into the ocean” where “The ocean is gray. Ugly under its lid of fog” [247]). By focusing on the experiences of Chinese and Chinese American prospectors and miners, Zhang’s novel complicates our visions of the American West and moves beyond the trope of (white) cowboys and Indians fighting along the soon-to-be-“closed” frontier. Instead, Zhang frames Chinese and Chinese American laborers as an integral part of the making of the West through gold and coal mining and through the construction of the transcontinental railroad.